For the past several months, the White House and the Treasury Department have been racing to tackle the program’s problems, repeatedly revising guidelines to allow tenants to receive payments with minimal documentation, while state judges and even that the law enlists school students to help tenants delay. or prevent their removal.
Gene Sperling, who is in charge of overseeing pandemic relief programs for President Biden, estimated that despite the shortcomings of rental aid so far, about 40 percent of vulnerable tenants in the country are either receiving aid or temporarily Has been protected from eviction by state and local moratoriums. .
“If low-performing states and regions don’t pick up the pace, there will be a meaningful and painful gap for hundreds of thousands of families,” Mr Sperling said. “It’s unacceptable and that’s why we’re still pushing as much as we can.”
No administration has played a similar role in the effort to prevent evictions before, which is overseen by state courts.
The federal government’s main rental subsidy is the Section 8 voucher program, which pays private landlords and nonprofit groups the difference between the market rate and the amount a tenant would pay. Funding has been stalled for decades, and waiting lists of up to 10 years are not uncommon in many cities.
Ingrid Gould Allen, faculty director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, said, “We have a rental housing shortage, a secular decline in affordability, and cost-burdened renters have little buffer for a rainy day. Is.” at New York University. “The pandemic only underscored the need for a permanent federal emergency rental program.”
But Section 8, with its painstaking certification requirements, does not provide a useful template for the new Emergency Rental Assistance Fund. So when the virus struck—and money began to rain—the federal government, states, and localities essentially had to invent an entirely new system, a process that would otherwise have involved years of trial and error.